Yesterday we had a look at Snapsat, a useful website for obtaining Landsat imagery. The location we chose was Dallas, Texas and a track made by a tornado in December last year.
We thought it would be interesting to compare the Landsat imagery with the European equivalent – Sentinel imagery.
Landsat 8 captures colour images at 30 m per pixel, but also captures has a panchromatic band at 15 m per pixel, which can be combined (using a process known as pansharpening) with the colour bands to essentially achieve close to 15 m per pixel resolution. Sentinel 2A, on the other hand, captures images in colour at 10 m per pixel and does not use pansharpening. So the Sentinel imagery should be slightly better quality and we found this was indeed the case.
We are still learning the best ways to process imagery and neither image has been processed ideally.
Landsat 8 imagery vs Sentinel 2A imagery.
Images courtesy of USGS/NASA Landsat and Copernicus Sentinel data 2016.
To see the images in Google Earth download this KML file
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About Timothy Whitehead
Timothy has been using Google Earth since 2004 when it was still called Keyhole before it was renamed Google Earth in 2005 and has been a huge fan ever since. He is a programmer working for Red Wing Aerobatx and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.